Blur, once the largest marketplace for trading Ethereum NFTs, is shutting down its website next month after trading activity collapsed more than 99% from its peak, marking the second major retreat in ten days for projects built by crypto entrepreneur Tieshun Roquerre.
The marketplace said Monday that its website will close on Nov. 12, while its $NFT lending service, Blend, will stop arranging new loans.
Borrowers have until that date to repay their loans or allow them to default. Blur plans to provide a separate tool afterward for withdrawing assets from Blend.
Blur’s underlying smart contracts will remain operational on Ethereum, meaning the shutdown does not eliminate the blockchain-based trading system. BLUR tokenholders will retain control of its fee switch — a mechanism that allows them to vote on whether the marketplace should start charging trading fees.
The decision follows the Oct. 2 shutdown announcement from Blast, an Ethereum scaling network also created by Roquerre, better known as Pacman, and developed by the team behind Blur.
Blast once attracted more than $2 billion in assets, partly through rewards offered to users depositing funds. That figure had fallen to approximately $32 million when developers announced the closure, saying the network cost more to operate than it generated in revenue.
Blur’s rise was just as dramatic.
Launched in 2022, it challenged the-then leader OpenSea by offering professional traders faster transactions, low fees and token rewards.
The strategy helped Blur capture more than 70% of Ethereum $NFT trading volume in March 2023, when activity on the platform reached approximately $1.43 billion, DefiLlama data shows
But Blur’s marketplace generated no revenue from transaction fees for all that trading activity. The platform charged traders nothing, and Token Terminal records $0 in protocol revenue over the past three years, despite billions of dollars in $NFT trades. However, the figure does not establish whether Blur earned money from its lending service or other activities.
Blur’s aggressive incentive programs had attracted criticism for encouraging speculative trading and putting pressure on royalties paid to $NFT creators. The trading figures alone do not establish how much activity came from genuine buyers rather than traders seeking rewards.
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